Final Jeopardy (Alexandra Cooper Mysteries) - Linda Fairstein [45]
Davis built a thriving studio, with offices in Manhattan and Chicago, and a long list of clients, from Volkswagen and Motorola to rap luminaries Sean “Puff Daddy” Combs and Kanye West. He eventually moved from the city to a hundred-year-old house with a barn in Mineola, on Long Island. As his success grew, he gave more thought to where his work fit in the history of art. In 2008, for a lecture series on dynamic abstraction, he focused on Jackson Pollock, the abstract artist famous for dripping paint on canvases from a stepladder. “Here’s a guy who says, ‘I’m going to paint, but I’m going to use gesture.’” Davis waved his arms to illustrate the movement. “Wherever the paint goes, the paint goes.” Not one to sell himself short, he said he felt like an extension of Pollock. “I’m creating systems where I establish the paints, the boundaries, and the colors. But where it goes is where it goes. It’s like controlled chaos.”
As Davis learned more about Pollock, his feelings of kinship only grew. He read that the other artist had also left the city, moved to Long Island, and worked in a barn. “It was, like, sweet!” Davis said. “How did that work out?”
It was around that time, in October 2008, that Davis got a call from an art director at Ogilvy & Mather, the international advertising agency. IBM, he learned, was building a computer to take on human champions in Jeopardy. How would he like to create the machine’s face?
During the first year of Blue J’s development, few at IBM thought much about the computer’s physical presence or its branding. A pretty face would be irrelevant if the team couldn’t come up with a workable brain. But by late summer of 2008, Ferrucci’s team was getting close. One August day, Harry Friedman and the show’s supervising producer, a former Jeopardy champion named Rocky Schmidt, visited the Yorktown labs for their first look at the bionic player.
As the group gathered in one of the windowless conference rooms at the Yorktown lab, Ferrucci walked them through the computer’s cognitive process, explaining how it came up with answers and why, on occasion, it flubbed them so badly. He explained that the hardware—what would become Watson’s body—wasn’t yet ready to deliver timely answers. But the team had led the computer through a game of Jeopardy, had recorded its answers, and then created a simulation of the game by loading the answers into a laptop. With that, Friedman and Schmidt watched the new contestant in action. Friedman later said that he had been “blown away” by the computer’s performance.
The conversation, according to Noah Syken, a media manager at IBM, quickly turned to logistics and branding. If the computer required the equivalent of a roaring data center to play the game, where would all that machinery fit on the Jeopardy set? And how about all the noise and heat it would generate? One possibility might be to set up its hulking body on the Wheel of Fortune set, next door, and run the answers to the podium. But that raised a bigger question: What would viewers see at that podium? No one had a clue.
The following month, as Lehman Brothers imploded, car companies crashed, and the world’s financial system appeared to teeter on the verge of collapse, IBM’s branding and marketing team worked to develop the personality and message of the Jeopardy-playing machine. It would need a face of some sort and a voice. And it had to have a name.
An entire corporate identity unit at IBM specialized in naming products and services. A generation earlier, when the company still sold machines to consumers, some of the names this division dreamed up became iconic. “PC” quickly became a broad term for personal computers (at least those that weren’t made by Apple). ThinkPad was the marquee brand for top-of-the-line